> Me, I prefered the slippage also - Ubu rules!
Mibee there's something about IHF and slippage. When I was little more than
a wean I heard two lines out of context:
The dancers inherit the Party,
While the talkers sit in corners alone, and glower.
Jeez, I thought, What A Profound Political Observation -- Stalinist Scottish
CP overturned by Art and Joy.
Then I finally read the whole poem, and it was about a (literal) party, not
the Party.
<sigh> A bit of a let-down.
My favourite work by Finlay is still _Glasgow Beasts, an a Burd (Haw, an
Inseks, an Aw, a Fush)_. Even though Finlay didn't do the woodcuts himself,
images and words fit perfectly.
But Finlay was a bit ahead of his time there (in the language side of
things). Glasgow language poetry (re) started [almost] independently of
Finlay, five years after he published the book. ***
And of the Two Big Scottish Concrete Poets, it was Edwin Morgan, who headed
in the opposite direction from Finlay, feeding elements from his concrete
work into his line poetry, rather than, as IHF did, further refining the
concrete side (eg. "The First Men In Mercury"), who had much the greater
influence on writers coming after. In Scotland, at least.
Robin Hamilton
( *** Though if you look at GBB, you'll see that Finlay, like Those Who Came
After, eschews the apostrophe -- nae couthy wee ticks pretenin' Scots is no
but a bastard version o' English.)
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